A Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) team discovered five of the critically endangered turtles in a wildlife sanctuary in Myanmar (Burma) in Southeast Asia. The sanctuary, originally established to protect elephants, contains thick stands of impenetrable bamboo forests and is rarely visited by people according to the report.

The adult turtles measure less than a foot in length; its shell is light brown with some black mottling. The species was believed extinct until 1994, when conservationists found a few specimens in a food market in China. Before then, the last know record of the species was of a single animal collected by a British Army officer in 1908. Many Asian turtle species have been driven to near extinction due to their demand as food.

On June 30 at 5 pm, about 80 activists from solidarity campaigns, trade unions and left wing organisations gathered outside the Honduras embassy in London to reject the military coup against president Mel Zelaya and demand his immediate reinstatement.

The US has also stopped issuing visas to Honduras‘s de facto officials. The decision is part of international efforts to ramp up pressure on the coup government to restore democracy.

Campaigners welcomed the British government’s plans to “explore with the EU the possibility of restrictions on travel for individuals associated with the regime,” but urged ministers to speed up the process.

The Foreign Office made the comment after the Morning Star contacted officials regarding Honduras’s de facto finance minister Gabriella Nunez’s claim that she attended last month’s G20 prefatory meetings in London on an invitation issued by “James Gordon Brown of Britain.”

Desperate to legitimise her illegal government, Ms Nunez told the Honduran press after arriving back from London: “One of the achievements of the meeting was the recognition that the president of the Central Bank of Honduras, Edwin Araque, and myself received as the authorities responsible for economic policies in Honduras.”

A Foreign Office spokeswoman strongly denied the allegations of “recognition” as “not true” and reiterated Britain’s opposition to the coup regime.

However, she did confirm that Ms Nunez and Mr Araque had indeed attended a G20-related meeting in London on August 17.

The spokeswoman stressed: “Ministers had no contact with the Honduran delegation during the conference.”

John McDonnell MP, who backed Jeremy Corbyn MP’s early day motion condeming Honduras‘s coup, said: “Representatives of the regime should be barred from visiting our country and if they manage to gain entry they should be arrested for the crime they have committed against Honduran democracy.”

Labour MP Colin Burgon, who is a signatory to the EDM, said that the Foreign Office’s statement had “exposed Ms Nunez’s claims of recognition to be lies.”

Mr Burgon said: “I welcome the fact that the British government and EU is exploring the possibility of restrictions on travel for individuals associated with the coup regime.

“These should be acted on immediately.”

Calvin Tucker, who reported for the Morning Star from Honduras during the coup, added: “The British government should back up its strong condemnation of the coup by insisting that all international insitututions immediately cease funding this illegal regime.”

In Sao Paolo, Brazil, over August 17-19, Green Left Weekly journalists Kiraz Janicke and Federico Fuentes, together with journalists from Marea Socialista (Venezuela) and Alternativa Socialista (Argentina) spoke to Gilberto Rios, from the National Popular Resistance Front against the Coup in Honduras (FN): here.

Interview with Honduras resistance leader: `The US is sustaining the coup’: here.

It found that online political involvement tends to mirror offline activities – the well-off and well-educated are far more likely to contact government officials, sign petitions, write to newspapers, make donations and communicate with political groups, whether on or off the internet.

The researchers did find “hints that forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites” are changing the situation and getting poorer people more engaged in politics.

But there’s certainly no sign of a massive surge in grass-roots involvement, despite the hype surrounding Barack Obama’s use of the web as a campaigning tool in the presidential elections.

So were the evangelists wrong about the net’s potential to change politics?

Well, first off, it’s not at all surprising that few poorer people are signing e-petitions or emailing newspapers and politicians – and not only because, as the researchers acknowledged, “those who are lower on the socio-economic ladder are less likely to go online or to have broadband access at home.”

And in the US even more than Britain, politics and the media are dominated by the interests of the wealthy – the Democrats have never been a workers’ party in the same way as Labour, nor are there any really successful populist tabloid papers, let alone a daily workers’ paper like the Morning Star.

So the internet is hardly going to cause the lower-paid to suddenly engage enthusiastically in US politics when there’s nothing much in traditional politics for them to engage with – nothing that acts for their interests or is controlled by them.

But that doesn’t mean poorer people are ignoring the net entirely, or that technology has failed to shake up political engagement.

The research also found that engagement through blogs or social networking sites is “not characterised by such a strong association with socio-economic stratification” – although this is partly because such sites are dominated by younger people, who are generally less well off than their elders.

The economic divide re-emerges – although it isn’t as big – when you look only at older bloggers.

This is encouraging, particularly if today’s younger people turn out to keep their blogging and social networking habits even as poorer-paid and less well-educated adults.

It’s a much easier way for them to speak out and be heard than trying to go through the conventional channels of the media and political parties, because the wealthy and privileged dominate the media message and breaking that down is much more than a matter of weight of numbers.

Or think how, since Thatcher, anyone who has raised the possibility of nationalising an industry is treated like a raving lunatic beyond the bounds of rational debate, no matter how strong the economic case or how much public support there may be.

But it’s not as simple as “internet debate = true democracy,” either.

In a free-for-all debate, the voices which shout the loudest tend to drive out everyone else. That means the articulate, the well-educated, those trained from birth to think they’re the natural and deserving top dogs.

Just take a look at the comments section of pretty much any newspaper website. They’re almost all dominated by rightwingers – white, male and wealthy, as far as it’s possible to tell on the net – confidently declaring themselves right about everything.

Racism’s over and any black person claiming otherwise is just playing the victim game. Sexism’s over – the reason why women are still paid less than men is because they’re just not as good, of course.

And similar nonsense spouted over and over and over, obnoxiously and with casual racism and sexism thrown in, with the smug certainty of the privileged.

Confronted with this kind of nonsense, people wanting to get seriously engaged in debates and action on racism, sexism, low pay, exploitation, peace, war and remaking society don’t bow out altogether.

They just go and set up a community where they can do so without being shouted down by the same privileged people who control the discourse elsewhere.

So, for instance, supporters of Swedish copyright reform didn’t bother lobbying their existing parties for change – they just went out and set up the Pirate Party, which has now been followed by a British equivalent (www.pirateparty.org.uk).

This week saw horrific but hardly surprising images emerge from Fallujah, where children continue to be born with grotesque and frequently fatal deformities.

Sky News ran a piece on the subject but somehow failed to draw any definite conclusions about the hideous mutation of babies in part of Iraq targeted with massive ordnance by allied forces and the happy-go-lucky use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus to carpet-bomb the place out of existence during their most recent jingoistic enterprise.

This would be the same [Rupert Murdoch owned] Sky News that was a tireless cheer-leader for the military campaign and got noticeably aroused by the technology on display but is now remodelling itself as the saviour of the children of Iraq. Talk about Damascene conversions.

There hasn’t been a transformation like that since David Shayler donned a blonde wig and demanded to be called Delores.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out why generations of Iraqi children have been effectively handed a death sentence at birth. It did, however, take one to load a warhead with enough fissile material to light up Las Vegas.

The Sky report stated that there was speculation chemical weapons may be behind the deformities.

No shit Sherlock!

These are babies with two heads and their internal organs on the outside. It’s going to take more than an illicit Woodbine to cause that kind of harm.

Then, in a particularly sickening piece of revisionism, Sky stated: “Yet even since we first started to give voice to the calls for help from the people of Fallujah (last year) things have got worse.”

We, mind you!

I seem to remember John Pilger reporting on the issue as far back as 2004 when he interviewed one of the poor sods whose job is was to clean up the mess – a man who now has 5,000 times the maximum tolerable level of radiation in his body.

September 2009. Travellers to the tropical lands of the Americas might be forgiven for mistaking many of the colourful insects flittering over sunny puddles or among dense forest understory are butterflies. In fact, many are moths that have reinvented themselves as butterflies, converging on the daytime niche typically dominated by their less hairy relatives. Now, a new revision of the taxonomic relationships among one such group of insects, the subfamily Dioptinae, sheds light on the diversity of tropical moth species and presents a unique story of parallel evolution.

Diurnal moths

“These diurnal moths are a microcosm of butterfly evolution,” says James Miller, author of the new Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History and a research associate in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum. “There are about 500 spectacular dioptine species, all of which evolved from a common ancestor-a nondescript brown nocturnal moth-into a diversity of butterfly mimics.” Miller qualifies this with a technicality, though, noting that no one is sure whether butterflies or diurnal moths evolved their colours first (and who is really mimicking whom).

Wing patterns

The wing pattern diversity within the subfamily is enormous: some species mimic clear-winged butterflies and inhabit the darker parts of the forest understory where their co-mimics fly. The caterpillars of these species feed on palms. Still others have wings that are coloured blue and yellow and feed on melastomes. About 100 species feed on Passiflora, the poisonous passion flowers famous for being consumed by the caterpillars of Heliconious [sic; Heliconius] butterflies. In fact, although most of the Dioptinae are diurnal, or fly during the day, a few species like those in Xenomigia have re-conquered the night. Although most dioptines are neotropical, ranging from lowland jungles to cloud forests at 4,000 metres in the Andes, Phryganidia californica occurs in the western United States.

The Dioptinae were first recognized as a distinct insect group in 1862 by Francis Walker of the British Museum of Natural History. At the same time, they were pivotal to the writings of Henry Walter Bates after he returned from a decade of exploration and collecting in the Amazon. Bates described moths that fly with and obtain protection from similarly-coloured but poisonous butterflies that derive their toxicity from the plants their caterpillars feed on. This system-whereby a harmless species gains protection from its resemblance to a toxic species-is now known as Batesian mimicry.

64 new species discovered in drawers – Hundreds more waiting discovery

Miller’s new revision of the Dioptinae is the first systematic look at this group in almost a century. After studying over 16,700 specimens housed at 38 different institutions and private collections around the world, Miller discovered and described 64 new species and seven new genera, bringing the total to 456 species in 43 genera. Some of the new species were found during field work in parts of the tropical Americas poorly explored by lepidopterists: Xenomigia pinasi from Río Chalpi Grande, Ecuador; Erbessa albilinea and Getta tica from Braulio Carrillo, Costa Rica; Phintia broweri from Tambopata, Peru, and Erbessa lamasi from the remote Cosñipata Valley of south-eastern Peru. Even so, there is much more work to be done on the Dioptinae. Miller estimates that there are about 100 to 150 species in collections that still need to be described and inserted into the taxonomy, and he thinks that additional fieldwork in under-sampled countries like Bolivia and Colombia will ultimately bring the total number of species to between 700 and 800.

Six times more insect species in tropical mountains than predicted: How many species of insects exist? Here.

September 2009. Thousands of people participating in this year’s National Moth Night over the coming nights of 18-19 September are being asked to look out for moths that have been specially marked at sites across Britain and Ireland. It’s part of a nationwide experiment to study the flight routes of moths: here.

Afghan officials said the attack had killed 90 people, including 40 civilians. The provincial governor, Mohammad Omar, told Reuters the dead included villagers who had gathered to collect fuel from the tankers. …

The incident could reignite anger with foreign troops over civilian casualties. It comes two months after the new commander of US and Afghan forces in the country, General Stanley McChrystal, announced measures to reduce civilian casualties, which he said were undermining the war effort. …

AFP reported that seriously burned people were crowding a hospital in Kunduz.

Taliban Says at Least 100 Civilians Killed in Strike on Hijacked Tanker: here. See also =here.

Labour MPs increased the pressure on Gordon Brown over Afghanistan last night after the resignation of a ministerial aide in pro- test over the handling of the war: here.

Britain: “Politicians are in denial. They refuse to confront the deep futility of the war. Afghans say: ‘Truth is like the sun. When it rises it is impossible to hide it.’ It will be some time before truth dawns in our parliament,” says Labour MP Paul Flynn: here.

Addicted in Afghanistan provides a glimpse into the heartbreaking lives of two of Afghanistan’s estimated one million drug addicts. Heartbreaking because the addicts in question are Zahir and Jaber, two 15-year-old boys who say they have been taking heroin for over seven years: here.